Thomas-hill: The Issue Was Race, Not Gender

The Private Pain, The Public Issue

I had a different view of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings from most Americans.

A view from a distance.

I was on vacation when the story broke this time last year -- in a villa on an idyllic Italian hilltop just outside Florence without a television set.

I was aware, of course, of the televised confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Thomas, the charges of sexual harassment leveled by Hill, his former aide, and the television phenomenon and nationwide debate that followed.

But I could only listen to sound bites from BBC radio, filling in the visual blanks with newspaper stills.

I've always felt since that I've been missing a piece of my American experience.

But after previewing "Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill: Public Hearing, Private Pain," the 11th season premiere of PBS' "Frontline" (Tuesday at 9 p.m.), I realize that even if I had been here and watching, I would have missed much of the point.

Why? Because I'm white.

Although the popular notion seemed to be that the Thomas-Hill hearings were all about gender, Emmy-winning producer Ofra Bikel's hourlong examination of the historic confrontation strongly suggests otherwise.

"The fact that the man and woman testifying were black," Bikel, who is white, says early in the documentary, "seemed not to matter. This was beyond race. Or so I thought. That was before I spoke with African-Americans I knew."

Those interview subjects -- ministers, politicians, civil-rights leaders, journalists, students and writers -- generally conclude, as Los Angeles Times columnist Sam Fulwood does in the program, that "The whole thing was fraught with race. Race was an issue out front first and foremost, and everybody knew that, but nobody wanted to acknowledge it."

For many whites, the hour will be a discomfiting eye-opener, a

stark look at just how different the American experience is for blacks compared with whites.

Because to many black Americans, the Thomas-Hill debate was deeply disturbing for reasons many whites would not -- could not, based on their experience -- even think of. It touched deep historical wounds, raised troubling and divisive issues within the black community and, in the words of one observer, amounted to a perverse exercise in racism.

But, as the program points out, President Bush said the color of Thomas' skin had nothing to do with his nomination. (He replaced Thurgood Marshall, the nation's first black Supreme Court justice.) In fact, it had everything to do with it.

It had everything to do, "Public Hearing, Private Pain" argues, with why Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee allowed Thomas to evade the most basic questions. (He could not, for example, recall having expressed an opinion publicly or privately, pro or con, on Roe vs. Wade.) "The Democrats didn't know how to oppose a black guy," says George Mason University professor Roger Wilkins. "They were afraid to offend black voters. They thought they could not oppose somebody on the grounds that he wasn't qualified without looking racist. So Bush had them paralyzed."

Color and race had everything to do with why many blacks, despite their serious political misgivings about Thomas, believed that Hill should have "let sleeping dogs lie."

"What Anita Hill did was to bring up a gender issue. And more than that, she brought up the issue of sex when it's a taboo in the black community," feminist-author Paula Giddings says in the show. "Black people were defined by being sexually different from whites in the society. So that anything that seems to confirm that view, especially revealed in public, gives us lots of ambivalence. That kind of difference got people lynched. That kind of difference got women raped."

Which is why Georgetown University law professor Patricia King offers this analysis.

"It's been drummed into us ... since birth: You don't betray black men, and I think many people saw Anita Hill as a traitor. She was a traitor to him and a traitor to the community because she washed all that dirty linen in public." (Although she added that she was glad Hill did.)

And color had everything to do with why Thomas denounced the proceedings as a "high-tech lynching."

Says Lester Johnson, a close friend to Thomas, "Clarence wanted to send out a lot of subliminal mesages to a lot of people. Black people know what lynching was all about. And he wanted them to know, `Hey, man, I know you've all been against me. You've all said I'm not your man. And here I am being nominated and these folks are lynching me. And I'm black. And they're doing it the same way they did it in those days.' "

As a viewer, as an American, I still regret having not seen the hearings (this show uses clips sparingly). And it's obvious that Tuesday night's "Frontline" won't receive the same kind of attention the hearings did.

But it should.

"Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill: Public Hearing, Private Pain," a presentation of PBS' "Frontline," will be broadcast Tuesday night at 9, locally on WEDH, Channel 24